Biohub Leads $500M Push to Generate Biological Data for AI Models
Leading research institutes and consortia in the US and Europe are teaming up with Biohub to coordinate a large-scale data generation effort.
Biohub is marshaling $500 million and a coalition of elite research institutions towards a worldwide effort to generate data for use in training new artificial intelligence-powered models of biology.
On April 29, the Mark Zuckerberg-backed research funding organization announced it would provide $100 million to fund research to “anchor” the data-generation project and $400 million to help develop those data under the Virtual Biology Initiative (VBI.)
“To build artificial intelligence that can accurately represent the full complexity of biology and accelerate scientific research, we need orders of magnitude more data than exists today,” Alex Rives, Biohub’s head of science, said in a statement. “We need new technologies to observe the cell, from the molecular to the tissue level, and in the context of health and disease.”
Biohub said the data generated under the VBI would be “open and freely available as a resource for the worldwide scientific community.”
Joining Biohub to create these data are the Allen Institute, Arc Institute, Broad Institute, and Wellcome Sanger Institute, as well as consortia including the Human Cell Atlas, Billion Cells Project, and the Human Protein Atlas. Nvidia will provide computing resources, AI development tools, and technical expertise.
“The biomedical community has a long tradition of coming together around ambitious projects to assemble, analyze and freely share large-scale data, dating all the way back to the Human Genome Project,” Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute, said in a statement. “Fully deciphering the logic of cells is a huge challenge, but it has the potential to transform medicine. And it’s a challenge that will once again take many groups and perspectives collaborating together.”
The VBI comes just six months after Zuckerberg and his wife, physician Priscilla Chan, decided to throw the majority of their philanthropic efforts behind the development of AI tools for biology. The pledge likely dwarfs the January announcement that Biohub, the Arc Institute, and Tahoe Therapeutics would collaborate on a large single-cell sequencing data set for virtual cell modeling. Prior to relaunching as Biohub, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative partnered with 10x Genomics and Ultima Genomics on the Billion Cells Project, another data generation effort for AI virtual cell modeling.
The majority of the VBI funding will be invested within Biohub to develop technology and infrastructure, such as cryo-electron tomography, microscopy, and molecular, cellular, and tissue engineering technologies.
How Biohub plans to distribute $100 million to external researchers isn’t clear.
Biohub is also teaming up with Renaissance Philanthropy, a science-focused philanthropy matchmaker, to expand the pool of funding for data generation.